The author of this article is both cherry-picking quotations from the ancient Greeks, ignoring the large body of artwork by them which often depicts sexual intercourse between males, and is essentially contorting himself to make his argument. It is true that the concept of a homosexual life-long union recognized by the state did not exist until very recently. That certainly does NOT make it "unnatural." While I have my reservations about gay "marriage" as opposed to civil unions, ultimately the state should not be involved in granting licenses for marriage at all, nor was it until very recently. Nor was there the issue of treatment for tax purposes.

Homosexual behavior has now been observed and verified in 100s of animal species, and in many cases these male-male pairings last for life. Ask any farmer, and he will tell you that there are 'homosexual" bulls, goats and sheep, who prefer to have intercourse with the same sex, and show very little if any interest in the opposite sex. This notion of the behavior being "unnatural" is simply false - and it is used in a tortuous manner to justify prohibiting such relationships by those who want to do so for whatever reasons, just as there were plenty of Biblical justifications offered to justify slavery, up until quite recently.

I take my own life experience as a great teacher, and include in this what I have observed over my 50+ years on this earth. Anthropologists will tell you that the percentage of homosexual individuals in human society has remained constant for as long as history has been recorded on such things. Animal data appear to show that this is also true in other species. If this were a genetic defect or aberration, by the way, one would expect that it would be bred out of the population over time. It clearly has not been. These tortuous justifications for condemning homosexuality are tiresome.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Not intending to be tiresome, offered more in the spirit of the offerrings contrary to the tidal wave with which the pravdas and the progressives seek to innundate us that endeavor to engage the discussion on a more serious level. I agree that the piece does do some cherry pickings and certainly you make valid points.

" ultimately the state should not be involved in granting licenses for marriage at all, nor was it until very recently. Nor was there the issue of treatment for tax purposes."

Now this is an interesting point and I invite you to flesh it out further.

Happily married people ask how the gay marriage issue could possibly affect their marriage. Obj's proposal illuminates that. First we define marriage to not mean marriage, then make it unrecognized altogether.

The federal government is already shifting to parent-one, parent-two designations, removing recognition of basic natural phenomena like mother and father as fast as they can. Why only two parents or spouses, politicians and bureaucrats only know.

Like Barack Obama, my own thinking has evolved. Somewhere between 2 and 3% of people are gay. Condemnation of that is not helpful. Everyone has the right of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Denying the unique relationship of a man and a woman becoming husband and wife is not helpful either. Nor is dropping a societal preference that a child have a mother and a father in love, married and living under one roof whenever possible.

From a straight, quite conservative Christian pastor in Wisconsin who has been arguing against getting a state marriage license for over 13 years now:

You should not have to obtain a license from the State to marry someone anymore than you should have to obtain a license from the State to be a parent, which some in academic and legislative circles are currently pushing to be made law.

When I marry a couple, I always buy them a Family Bible which contains birth and death records, and a marriage certificate. We record the marriage in the Family Bible. What’s recorded in a Family Bible will stand up as legal evidence in any court of law in America. Early Americans were married without a marriage license. They simply recorded their marriages in their Family Bibles. So should we.

(Pastor Trewhella has been marrying couples without marriage licenses for ten years. Many other pastors also refuse to marry couples with State marriage licenses.)

This pamphlet is not comprehensive in scope. Rather, the purpose of this pamphlet is to make you think and give you a starting point to do further study of your own. If you would like an audio sermon regarding this matter, just send a gift of at least five dollars in cash to: Mercy Seat Christian Church 10240 W. National Ave. PMB #129 Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53227.

« Last Edit: March 27, 2013, 08:04:45 PM by objectivist1 »

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

What about the notion that government has a role in protecting those who cannot protect themselves? Hypothetical: Traditional type marriage, dad works, mom focuses on the home and the young children. Mom is relying upon Husband's promise to provide for her and the children. Now he decides to run off with his secretary with the big, perky tits.

Under the framework you are advocating, what, if anything, is to be done?

In answer to your question - action could easily be brought in civil court, and in fact was before marriage licenses were invented. The family Bible, with the signatures of the married persons and two witnesses (or separate contract that was generally kept in the Bible or in the case of Jews - Torah) was recognized as legally binding by every state in the Union.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

What about polygamy? Group marriage? (multiple men/women) Gay/Lesbian relationships?

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This makes sense to me:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344124/marital-discord-court-editorsOver the past two days, the Supreme Court has been considering whether to overturn two duly enacted pieces of legislation — the federal Defense of Marriage Act and a California constitutional amendment — on the basis of novel theories about the Fourteenth Amendment that had occurred to almost nobody until quite recently. It should let the laws stand.

In the California case, a popular referendum ratifying the definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman is said to violate the Constitution’s guarantee that states will extend the “equal protection of the laws” to all persons, including those persons in same-sex couples who wish to have the state government declare their relationships to be marriages.

Equality means that like cases should be treated alike. Whether California’s definition of marriage meets that standard depends on whether or not there is some difference between opposite-sex and same-sex couples that justifies recognizing some of the former and none of the latter as marriages in the eyes of the law. The answer to that question in turn depends on what we understand marriage to be.

It turns, that is, on whether marriage should be understood to have an ineradicable connection to procreation or be understood exclusively in romantic terms. If the basic purpose of marriage as a pre-political institution and a public policy is to channel heterosexual behavior into the social forms most likely to lead to stable child-rearing, as we believe, then it makes sense that its definition includes sexual complementarity and involves no invidious discrimination. Many people do not, of course, accept this premise, and they have advanced various arguments against it.

The Constitution is silent — obviously silent — about which side is correct, and that is reason enough for the Court to allow California to decide the matter as it wishes, which of course means to allow it to change its mind. The Court should forthrightly declare that the Constitution gives it no authority to choose one side or the other. It should reject calls for it to “punt” by ruling that defenders of the law have no standing to plead their case, which would have the effect of allowing lower-court judges to write same-sex marriage into the Constitution for their jurisdictions.

Justice Scalia neatly exposed the weak spot of the argument that the Constitution requires same-sex marriage when he asked Ted Olson, a lawyer making that argument, when that requirement came about. Olson declined to make the ludicrous contention that the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 was the public’s way of advancing same-sex marriage. That left him arguing that the evolution of the culture had changed the meaning of the amendment. Public views on homosexuality and marriage certainly have changed: But that change can be and has been expressed in the votes of citizens and legislators.

The other case before the Court is a challenge to the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act that defines marriage, for purposes of federal law, as the union of a man and a woman. Here the challengers make an argument beyond their equal-protection claim. The federal government is supposedly infringing on the states’ power to set marriage laws by insisting on its own definition in its own laws.

One would think that to state that claim is to refute it, but Justice Kennedy showed signs of crediting it. The act leaves states free to adopt any marriage law they want. The Constitution does not compel the federal government to use the states’ definitions in its own laws, although it may decide to do that as a matter of administrative convenience. If the federal government has the power to designate some households in tax laws as joint filers — which no one contests — then it has the power to say which households, and so long as its classifications are compatible with the Constitution it cannot matter if they track state law. Federalism does not, in other words, mean that state governments have the right to force federal law to change to their liking. Chief Justice Roberts exposed the emptiness of this “federalism” argument when he asked whether the federal government would invade the province of the states by extending marriage-related federal benefits to all cohabiting same-sex couples in all states, even those that recognize no such couples as married or even in a civil union. The opponents of DOMA were appropriately flummoxed by the question.

In both cases, the Court should leave lawmaking authorities to do their will. We oppose same-sex marriage, but in the absence of a constitutional amendment enshrining our view it would be wrong for the Supreme Court to block it — and nobody has ever argued otherwise. Proponents of same-sex marriage feel no such inhibitions. The Supreme Court should be more dispassionate.

Crafty - I don't know the civil law code by heart, but a good friend who is an Atlanta cop (and a libertarian) told me that the law is enforced against men who won't pay child support in the 'hood here all the time - they go to jail. And the overwhelming majority of these people are not married. The same principle would apply.

Same-sex civil unions could be formed with a contract. As for polygamy - not sure what the issue is here. The state could outlaw it - which I think is bad policy - but if it were legal - the same principle would apply. The state should not be granting "permission" for people to form sexual/romantic relationships with one another. It's contrary to the concept of liberty as our Founders understood it. I might also point out that there are multiple references to polygamous marriages in the Torah - evidently at that time it was sanctioned by God, as the Israelites understood Him.

I am often vexed by the church/synagogue authorities decreeing that this, that or the other is "sinful" according to their arbitrary judgement, and then decreeing to their flocks that their pronouncement be taken as "gospel." Evidently only THEY have the ability to discern "what God really meant" in Scripture. Jesus was extremely critical of this very behavior, and often spoke out against it.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

FWIW, on the issue of the genetics of gayness, I think there are some people who are born that way and some whose life experiences affect how they turn out.

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Memo to Lady Gaga: “born this way” doesn’t mean “act this way”

Daniel Kuebler | 25 June 2013

A growing laissez-faire libertarian attitude toward social issues among Americans is arguably the most important weapon available to same-sex marriage advocates. Certainly there are LGBT militants with unwavering commitment to the issue, but the vast majority of those who “support” same-sex marriage can hardly be said to support anything. They just have a hard time saying no. They much prefer the sanitary hands off approach—let them live out their sexuality as long as I don’t have to get involved.

This laissez-faire attitude is often coupled with a heavy dose of biological determinism, which bestows a tacit scientific stamp of approval on any and all types of sexual behavior. Consider Lady Gaga’s popular song, “Born this Way,” in which she sings, “Cause baby, you were born this way, no matter gay, straight or bi, lesbian, transgendered.” She then encourages people to, among other things, embrace whatever sexual proclivities they have inherited.

The underlying message is that we as a society should just accept any and all manifestations of sexual orientation and sexual behavior because people are merely acting upon their God-given biological inclinations. The end result for those saturated in this cultural marinade is that they are afraid to refuse the designation of marriage to same-sex couples who are only doing what comes “naturally” to them.

There are two problems with this type of reasoning. First, it’s questionable whether sexual orientation is biologically determined. Second, even if genetic and developmental factors cause one to have same-sex attractions, it does not follow that one’s biology should determine one’s behavior, much less dictate one’s morality.

In the last twenty years, scientific research has failed to generate a consensus on the exact relationship between biological factors and same-sex attractions. But there is general agreement that genetic/developmental factors do have an influence.

In fact, there is good evidence that genetic and/or developmental alterations can lead to homosexual behaviors in animals ranging from fruit flies to rams. Genetic manipulations in fruit flies, for example, have produced female flies that display courtship to other females and males that display courtship to other males. Similar results have been found in mice, with one recent studyshowing that removing a single gene in females causes them to attempt to copulate with other females and to exhibit other male-specific behaviors.

Studies with rams have found that changes in pre-natal exposure totestosterone can cause structural changes in specific sexually dimorphic brain regions, changes that have been linked to homosexual behaviors.

While it seems clear that some animals can be “born this way,” things are much more ambiguous in humans. For starters, human sexual inclinations are much more complex and nuanced, as evidenced by the broad continuum of human sexual orientations and behaviors. Because of this, social scientists lack a clear consensus on what exactly it means to be gay, bisexual, or lesbian. Not only is sexual orientation in humans difficult to pin down—should anyone who has homosexual thoughts be considered gay—it is notoriously fluid, as an individual’s identification as gay, bisexual, or heterosexual often changes repeatedly over time. Both of these points are argued persuasively by psychiatrist Paul McHugh in his amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Hollingsworth case.

Given these complexities, it should not be surprising that studies looking for a biological cause for homosexuality in humans have been equivocal, leaving plenty of room for social and environmental factors to influence sexual preference.

For example, no gene has yet been definitively linked to homosexuality. While some studies have found genes or chromosome regions that may be linked, follow up studies have reported contradictory results.

There is stronger evidence that developmental factors can influence homosexual behavior, but even here there are caveats. Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) are exposed to higher levels of male sex hormones in utero and have a higher propensity to exhibit homosexual behavior as adults. Still, the majority of these women are heterosexual and only a small minority of CAH females is exclusively homosexual, indicating that other factors, most likely social ones, are at work.

Likewise, there is evidence that having an older brother increases the likelihood of homosexuality in boys. Researchers hypothesize that the mother produces an immune response to male-specific antigens in the first pregnancy, a response that can disrupt normal development in later male pregnancies. Again though, most men with an older brother are heterosexual and many homosexual men have no older brothers, so this hypothesis is limited in scope.

Consequently, it’s not clear whether all people with homosexual inclinations, or even the majority, are born that way or if social and environmental factors shape their attractions. But even if one were to grant, in the face of ambiguous evidence, that Lady Gaga is right, it doesn’t follow that such behavior should be promoted and sanctioned by codifying same-sex marriage into law.

We are not at the mercy of our biology. This is what sets humans apart from the other animals. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, titled “Nature’s Case for Same Sex Marriage,” biologist David Haskell claims that homosexuality is natural in the trivial sense that homosexual activity occurs in nature. Yet, after highlighting the homosexual behavior of pygmy chimps and mallard ducks in an attempt to soften the resistance to same-sex marriage, Haskell had the good sense to realize that animal behavior “does not provide [us] ready-made moral guidance.” He could have made this even clearer by discussing the fact that chimps and orangutans satisfy their biological urge for reproductive dominance via rape and/or infanticide.

As primates, our sexual behavior is certainly influenced by our biology (this is true regardless of our sexual orientation). Yet the mere fact that we have a biological urge or tendency does not give us justification to act on it.

In fact, the legal and social framework of civil society is structured by the premise that we should keep our biologically-driven desires in check or channel them for the sake of the common good. For example, males have a biological tendency—it’s in our genetic make-up—to find pornography titillating. That doesn’t mean that our society should promote it or encourage its use. Evidence suggests that pornography use hurts our ability to form the stable committed relationships necessary to a productive, well-ordered society. Thus society has laws (though they are ever being eroded) that limit and restrict where pornography can be displayed and who can view it.

Likewise, the unfettered expression of the male sex drive, particularly by men who claim to have a biologically heightened appetite (addiction) to sex, is hardly beneficial to society. Just ask any kid growing up fatherless or any single mother abandoned by her child’s father. To prevent or mitigate these effects, our society has laws to counter these natural biological urges, laws against adultery, even though they are no longer enforced, and laws that require child support and alimony payments.

Clearly, having a biological predisposition or urge does not justify pursuing it, let alone justify promoting it as a society. The same holds true for same-sex marriage. Even if we eventually decipher a clear biological explanation for homosexual inclinations, we need to have a respectful debate about whether promoting and encouraging people to act on them benefits society as a whole.

In the case of same-sex marriage, there is an acute need for both open discussion and clear investigation of how promoting homosexual inclinations would influence the family, especially parenting. Unfortunately, most Americans avoid this kind of debate, because they have swallowed laissez-faire libertarianism and biological determinism, and because LGBT activists actively prevent the debate from unfolding.

Daniel Kuebler is Professor of Biology at Franciscan University of Steubenville. This article has been republished from MercatorNet's partner site Public Discourse.

Eight major studies of identical twins in Australia, the U.S., and Scandinavia during the last two decades all arrive at the same conclusion: gays were not born that way.

“At best genetics is a minor factor,” says Dr. Neil Whitehead, PhD. Whitehead worked for the New Zealand government as a scientific researcher for 24 years, then spent four years working for the United Nations and International Atomic Energy Agency. Most recently, he serves as a consultant to Japanese universities about the effects of radiation exposure. His PhD is in biochemistry and statistics.

Identical twins have the same genes or DNA. They are nurtured in equal prenatal conditions. If homosexuality is caused by genetics or prenatal conditions and one twin is gay, the co-twin should also be gay.

“Because they have identical DNA, it ought to be 100%,” Dr. Whitehead notes. But the studies reveal something else. “If an identical twin has same-sex attraction the chances the co-twin has it are only about 11% for men and 14% for women.”

Because identical twins are always genetically identical, homosexuality cannot be genetically dictated. “No-one is born gay,” he notes. “The predominant things that create homosexuality in one identical twin and not in the other have to be post-birth factors.”The predominant things that create homosexuality in one identical twin and not in the other have to be post-birth factors.

Dr. Whitehead believes same-sex attraction (SSA) is caused by “non-shared factors,” things happening to one twin but not the other, or a personal response to an event by one of the twins and not the other.

For example, one twin might have exposure to pornography or sexual abuse, but not the other. One twin may interpret and respond to their family or classroom environment differently than the other. “These individual and idiosyncratic responses to random events and to common environmental factors predominate,” he says.

The first very large, reliable study of identical twins was conducted in Australia in 1991, followed by a large U.S. study about 1997. Then Australia and the U.S. conducted more twin studies in 2000, followed by several studies in Scandinavia, according to Dr. Whitehead.

“Twin registers are the foundation of modern twin studies. They are now very large, and exist in many countries. A gigantic European twin register with a projected 600,000 members is being organized, but one of the largest in use is in Australia, with more than 25,000 twins on the books.”

A significant twin study among adolescents shows an even weaker genetic correlation. In 2002 Bearman and Brueckner studied tens of thousands of adolescent students in the U.S. The same-sex attraction concordance between identical twins was only 7.7% for males and 5.3% for females—lower than the 11% and 14% in the Australian study by Bailey et al conducted in 2000.

In the identical twin studies, Dr. Whitehead has been struck by how fluid and changeable sexual identity can be.

“Neutral academic surveys show there is substantial change. About half of the homosexual/bisexual population (in a non-therapeutic environment) moves towards heterosexuality over a lifetime. About 3% of the present heterosexual population once firmly believed themselves to be homosexual or bisexual.”

“Sexual orientation is not set in concrete,” he notes.

Most changes in sexual orientation are towards exclusive heterosexuality.

Even more remarkable, most of the changes occur without counseling or therapy. “These changes are not therapeutically induced, but happen ‘naturally’ in life, some very quickly,” Dr. Whitehead observes. “Most changes in sexual orientation are towards exclusive heterosexuality.”

Numbers of people who have changed towards exclusive heterosexuality are greater than current numbers of bisexuals and homosexuals combined. In other words, ex-gays outnumber actual gays.

The fluidity is even more pronounced among adolescents, as Bearman and Brueckner’s study demonstrated. “They found that from 16 to 17-years-old, if a person had a romantic attraction to the same sex, almost all had switched one year later.”

“The authors were pro-gay and they commented that the only stability was among the heterosexuals, who stayed the same year after year. Adolescents are a special case—generally changing their attractions from year to year.”

Still, many misconceptions persist in the popular culture. Namely, that homosexuality is genetic – so hard-wired into one’s identity that it can’t be changed. “The academics who work in the field are not happy with the portrayals by the media on the subject,” Dr. Whitehead notes. “But they prefer to stick with their academic research and not get involved in the activist side.”

Libertarians and liberal Republicans have been proposing a truce on social issues in order to be able to concentrate on fiscal issues, but there is no such thing as a truce on any issue with the left.

Brendan Eich offered the left a truce on gay marriage. He talked about tolerance and diversity and he got his head handed to him. His forced departure from the Mozilla Foundation, which is behind the Firefox browser, should be a wake up call to anyone on the right who still thinks that social issues can be taken off the table and that we can all agree to disagree.

Those on the right who insist that conservatism should be reduced to fiscal issues imagine that the culture war is a fight that the right picked with the left. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The left does not care about gay marriage. In most left-wing regimes, homosexuality was persecuted. It was illegal in the USSR. Gay men were locked up in Cuba and are still targeted in China. Nicolas Maduro, the current hero of the left, openly uses homophobic language without any criticism from his Western admirers. It goes without saying that homosexuality is criminalized throughout the Muslim world.

Engels viewed homosexuality as a perversion born out of the bourgeois way of life that would be eliminated under socialism. The Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States stated that homosexuality “is a product of the decay of capitalism” and vowed that once the revolution took place, a “struggle will be waged to eliminate it and reform homosexuals.”

The left’s shift on this issue, as on many issues, was purely tactical. The left’s leading lights were racists who jumped into civil rights. They were sexists who became feminists. They were advocates for the working class who despised the idea of working for a living.

The culture war does not emerge from the left’s deeply held beliefs. Its leaders could care less about the things that they pretend to care about. It emerges instead from the need to maintain a constant state of domestic conflict.

You can’t have a truce when the other side wants a war.

Did the activists who claimed Eich’s scalp care about him or his $1,000 donation to defend marriage? They’re already forgetting his name and moving on to the next target. Eich just happened to make a good target. The Mozilla Foundation is shaky, its board was insecure, and once an online dating company cynically came out with a publicity stunt to keep the news cycle churning, the scalp of the man behind Javascript was claimed. If he had hung on for another few days, the whole thing would have gone away.

Next week it will be someone else. And then the week after that.

Opting out of the conflict means standing by while men like Eich are torn down, not because they did anything wrong, but because destroying them allows the left to feel the thrill of its power over people.

Every gang needs to hurt and terrorize people in order to feel its power. Unlike a Chicago street gang which goes in for an honest mugging or beating, the online activists of the left do their dirty work in this way. Afterward there is no blood and there are no bruises, but lives are destroyed and its social justice activists chortle to themselves coming off an adrenaline high before going after someone else.

The purpose of these purges is not to make the country more tolerant, but to make it more afraid. The message of the Eich purge is not, “accept gay marriage,” it’s “don’t question us.” As many have pointed out, Eich had the same view of gay marriage at the time he made that donation as Obama and Hillary.

But Eich wasn’t “us.” He wasn’t a member of the club.

Members of the club can and do make racist jokes. They can oppose gay marriage. They can sexually harass female employees, pay them less and even kill them. They can do all these things because the “club” is not about gay marriage or equal rights for race or gender.

It’s about the supreme power of the club.

You can call the club, liberalism, progressivism or simply “the left.” You can call its members Marxists, Socialists or anything else you like. They go by many names, some real and some fake, but they are the “club”; a totalitarian organization dedicated to absolute power in the name of any available lie.

The left is a totalitarian movement that inverts everything it touches. It fights against poverty by making more men poor. It helps black people by keeping them down, and it promotes tolerance through displays of intolerance. Its endgame is simply raw power. It wants as much of it as it can get its hands on.

We can stand aside, but it will affect us sooner or later. Even if we don’t get picked to be the teachable moment of the day, we will find ourselves in a country that is less free and more oppressive every year.

The idea that any part of the left’s agenda can be delinked and ignored is wishful thinking. The left’s incessant accusations of racism show that the refusal to engage an issue does not take it off the table. It’s the left that determines the content and the context of the conflict. And that’s why the right is losing. It imagines that it can unilaterally retreat to more favorable ground.

That’s a strategy that has yet to work.

The left doesn’t do truces. If the right cedes gay marriage, all it will have won is the right to be called homophobes for the next hundred years. And the culture war will move on to the next issue and the one after that. The purges will continue and more criminals guilty of thought crimes will be paraded for the virtual cameras. Yesterday’s commonplace idea will be tomorrow’s act of unspeakable bigotry that prevents you from being employed, opening a business or even staying out of prison.

You may be in the clear today, but you won’t be tomorrow.

Wars aren’t won by constantly retreating. They’re won by taking a stand for what you believe in.

The left constantly takes stands, but it believes in nothing. Like all totalitarian movements, it worships at the feet of the bronze bull of power. It believes in the virtue of its outrage, the might of its rhetoric and the pleasure of trampling an enemy underfoot. Every one of its beliefs are baseless and expendable in the name of its true god of power.

The right has sold its moral birthright in the hopes of being tolerated by a movement with no morals or beliefs except in the virtue of its own intolerance. It strategically embraces the left’s ideas and hopes that this process will eventually lead to a truce.

It can’t and it won’t.

The left does not hate the right because of gay marriage. It does not hate the right because it thinks that the right is racist, sexist, transphobic, semaphoric or plasmatic. It hates the right because it is not of the left. The right stands in the way of its absolute power. These two things are enough to be hated.

Totalitarian movements are destructive. They feed off conflict and desire absolute power. They cannot be compromised with, reasoned with or appeased. Instead they have to be exposed for what they are.

The only way to beat a totalitarian movement is to expose the dirty little secret that it is not pro-black, pro-gay, pro-woman or pro anything except pro-power. It is a greedy, corrupt and selfish movement that does not stand for a better world tomorrow, but for unlimited abuses of power in the world today.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Is that a just comparison? Is opposition to same-sex marriage at all like opposition to inter-racial marriage? Does protecting the freedom to speak and act publicly on the basis of a religious belief that marriage is the union of a man and woman amount to the kind of laws that banned inter-racial marriage?

No, and no, says Ryan Anderson, a US expert on the marriage issue, in a background paper published by the Heritage Foundation. First, because the belief that marriage is a man-woman union is a reasonable belief, and second, because when they lead their lives and run their businesses in accordance with that belief, citizens deny no-one equality before the law.

A reasonable belief...

Great thinkers throughout human history—and from every political community up until the year 2000—thought it reasonable to view marriage as the union of male and female, husband and wife, mother and father. Indeed, support for marriage as the union of man and woman has been a near human universal.

This view is based on human nature and what marriage is for:

The conclusion that marriage is the union of man and woman follows from a proper understanding of human nature. Rightly understood, marriage is a comprehensive union. It unites spouses at all levels of their being: hearts, minds, and bodies, where man and woman form a two-in-one-flesh union. It is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are distinct and complementary, on the bio­logical fact that reproduction requires a man and a woman, and on the sociological reality that children benefit from having a mother and a father.4

Historically, even where homosexuality was accepted the idea of same-sex marriage did not arise:

Far from having been devised as a pretext for excluding same-sex relationships—as some now charge—marriage as the union of husband and wife arose in many places over several centuries entirely independent of and well before any debates about same-sex relationships. Indeed, it arose in cultures that had no concept of sexual orientation and in some that fully accepted homoeroticism and even took it for granted.

The idea that different races should not marry came late in history and arises from prejudice, not reason:

Searching the writings of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Maimonides and Al-Farabi, Luther and Calvin, Locke and Kant, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., one finds that the sexual union of male and female goes to the heart of their reflections on marriage but that considerations of race with respect to marriage never appear. Only late in human history does one see political communities prohibiting intermarriage on the basis of race. Bans on interracial marriage had nothing to do with the nature of marriage and everything to do with denying dignity and equality before the law.

These laws were virtually unique to America and were driven by the view that black slaves were neither citizens nor persons. The laws had nothing to do with the nature of marriage, but were based on errors about the human nature and dignity of black persons.

Laws that define marriage as the union of one man and one woman are not unjust, like the laws that prevented inter-racial marriage. To decide whether a marriage law is just or unjust you have to know what marriage is:

Marriage must be color-blind, but it cannot be gender-blind. The melanin content of two people’s skin has nothing to do with their capacity to unite in the bond of marriage as a comprehensive union naturally ordered to procreation. The sexual difference between a man and a woman, however, is central to what marriage is. Men and women regardless of their race can unite in marriage, and children regardless of their race deserve moms and dads. To acknowledge such facts requires an understanding of what, at an essential level, makes a marriage.

Anderson cites key US court cases striking down inter-racial marriage bans – and in the process shedding light on the essential gendered nature of marriage. The Catholic Church and other religious groups played prominent parts in the ending of racial discrimination in marriage – so it is not from a history of prejudice that many religious people now claim the right to speak and act publicly on the basis of a belief that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.

...that ought to be protected

But isn’t refusing to take photos of a same sex wedding or providing catering for such an event now, just the same as refusing to let Negros into your restaurant in the 1950s? No it is not. That is because racism is unreasonable and an historical and geographical aberration, while the belief that marriage is between a man and woman only is a reasonable belief based on all of human history up until the year 2000.

Furthermore, refusing to provide services for a same-sex wedding is not an act of discrimination against any individual or their sexual preferences; it is a refusal to endorse an action that one believes is a lie. In other circumstances the baker or florist would be happy to serve the individuals involved. Besides, there are plenty of businesses willing to facilitate same-sex weddings and the market can easily take care of the demand.

Yet in a growing number of cases, government coercion and penalties have violated religious free­dom with respect to marriage. Family businesses— especially photographers, bakers, florists, and oth­ers involved in the wedding industry—have been hauled into court because they declined to facilitate or participate in a same-sex ceremony in violation of their religious beliefs.

It is time, says Anderson, to stop this trend by legislation:

Legislators should enact commonsense religious liberty protections that would prevent the imposition of substantial burdens on sincere religious beliefs unless the government proves that imposing such a burden is necessary to advance a compelling government interest (and does so by the least intrusive or restrictive means).

He quotes law professor and religious liberty expert Douglas Laycock—a same-sex marriage supporter: "I know of no American religious group that teaches discrimination against gays as such, and few judges would be persuaded of the sincerity of such a claim. The religious liberty issue with respect to gays and lesbians is about directly facilitating the marriage, as with wedding services and marital counseling."

Thus, when it comes to flower arrangements and wedding photographers, what is the compelling state interest? How is forcing every photographer to take same-sex wedding photos the least restrictive way of serving that interest, whatever it may be? Not every florist need provide wedding arrangements for every ceremony. Not every photographer need capture every first kiss. Competitive markets can best harmonize a range of values that citizens hold without government interference.

It’s all about living in a free society, Anderson concludes: “Protecting religious liberty and the rights of conscience does not restrict anyone’s freedom to enter into whatever romantic partnerships he or she wishes.”

The debate over gay marriage is not just taking place in the nation’s courts – it is also a subject of intense discussion in the nation’s churches.

Matthew Vines, an openly gay, evangelical Christian and the author of “God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships,” has been actively encouraging conservative Christians to re-evaluate their beliefs about homosexuality. He has engaged them in private conversations, in public talks and through the organization he founded, the Reformation Project.

He was recently invited by the Rev. Caleb Kaltenbach, lead pastor of Discovery Church in Simi Valley, Calif,, to talk privately with a small group of evangelical leaders to discuss what the Bible says about gay relationships. Mr. Kaltenbach is the author of the forthcoming book “Messy Grace,” which is about how he reconciles his conservative Christian convictions with his experience as the child of gay parents.

After the session, they were each asked to interpret some of the most cited verses relating to homosexuality in the Bible. (Text from the New International Version, 1984 edition.)

Romans 1:26-27

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their perversion. Photo Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times Caleb Kaltenbach Lead pastor of Discovery Church in Simi Valley, Calif.

In this passage, Paul, who was quite familiar with biblical and secular views of sexual orientation, says that having sex with someone of the same gender is a sin. Some interpret this passage as a reference to heterosexuals who exchanged their natural sexual orientation for that which was not natural to them. The word that Paul uses for “natural” is not referring to what is natural to a specific person, but rather what is natural in light of God's intent for the sexual design of humanity. Ultimately, the passage serves as an introduction to verses 28-32, where Paul lists many other general sins that ultimately show our need for the Gospel. Photo Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times Matthew Vines Author of “God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships.”

Paul is explicit that the same-sex behavior in this passage is motivated by lust. His description is similar to the common ancient idea that people “exchange” opposite-sex for same-sex relations because they are driven by out-of-control desire, not because they have a different sexual orientation. And while Paul labels same-sex behavior “unnatural,” he uses the same word to criticize long hair in men in 1 Corinthians 11:14, which most Christians read as a synonym for “unconventional.” Christians should continue to affirm with Paul that we shouldn’t engage in sexual behavior out of self-seeking lustfulness. But that’s very different than same-sex marriages that are based on self-giving love, and we shouldn’t conflate the two in how we interpret this text today. Leviticus 18:22

Do not lie with a man as one lies with a woman; that is detestable. Caleb Kaltenbach

God’s prohibition always has positive intentions. While no longer under the Law, Christians see the Law as a moral compass with principles for holy living. The Bible doesn’t have middle ground on same-sex relationships, monogamous or not. God reserves sex for marriage between a man and woman, because sex is a unique foundation of intimacy. Imagine all the evils, struggles and pain that could be avoided in relationships if we really followed God’s principles. When sex is only seen as a benefit for individuals rather than a foundation of social structures, it becomes selfish and manipulative. Matthew Vines

Christ fulfilled the Old Testament law, and the New Testament teaches that Christians should live under the new covenant rather than the old one. Consequently, this verse has never applied to Christians. For a man to lie with a man “as with a woman” violated the patriarchal gender norms of the ancient world, which is likely why Leviticus prohibited it. But the New Testament casts a vision of God’s kingdom in which the hierarchy between men and women is overcome in Christ. So not only is Leviticus’s prohibition inapplicable to Christians on its own, the rationale behind it doesn’t extend to Christians, either. Matthew 19:3-6

Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”

“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh?' So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate.” Caleb Kaltenbach

Jesus says that marriage is between a man and a woman by quoting Genesis 1:27. He affirms that God created sexual distinction between man and woman and this distinction serves as part of the foundation for marriage (helping to make Adam and Eve suitable partners). Spiritually, this distinction ultimately points to Jesus and the cross, where Jesus (the bridegroom) would pledge his love for his church (the bride) on the cross. As Jesus' words are binding for today, remember that there was no individual in the Bible called to be celibate that was not honored by God, including Paul, John the Baptist and Jesus himself. Matthew Vines

Jesus responds to a question about divorce by emphasizing the permanence of the marriage bond. He was asked about a man and his wife, and he responds accordingly, by referring to male and female. Same-sex marriage wasn’t on the radar screen in the biblical world, so it’s not surprising that neither Jesus nor any of the biblical writers addresses it. Therefore, Christians today have to ask whether gay relationships can fulfill the core principles of Scripture’s teachings about marriage. Based on Jesus’ teaching here and other texts like Ephesians 5, the essence of Christian marriage involves keeping covenant with one's spouse in order to reflect God’s covenant with us through Christ. That’s something same-sex couples can and do live out today. 1 Corinthians 6:9-10

Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Caleb Kaltenbach

These words are found in the Greek translation of Leviticus 18 (which is what Paul would've used as a source when writing this letter). His phrase “men who have sex with men” is the Greek word arsenokoitai. It's a compound: arseno means “a male,” and koitai means “bed.” The word means “male bed”—or homosexuality. Though what Paul says might be offensive, he never intended to impose these values on non-Christians. In the current debate of same-sex marriage, there's an imposition of a meta-narrative being imposed from non-Christians to Christians. Should we violate our conscience and teachings of Scripture because of an agenda that labels us narrow-minded? That seems like an unfair expectation to me.

Matthew Vines

In this text, Paul uses two Greek words—malakoi and arsenokoitai—that likely refer to some forms of male same-sex behavior, but not the modern concept of homosexuality. The predominant forms of same-sex behavior in the ancient world were sex between masters and slaves, sex between adult men and adolescent boys, and prostitution. In all those cases, men used sex to express power, dominance and lustfulness, not self-giving love and mutuality. Committed same-sex unions between social equals represent very different values than the types of same-sex behavior Paul would have had in view in 1 Corinthians 6.